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CBTV

ELONGATION OF MAGPIE via original shortlived spin-off called Ace Reports featuring WAYNE “PIPKINS” LAREYA. TOMMY BOYD was still present but this time kicking sides were JIM SWEENEY, STEVE STEEN and a junior MIKE SMITH. Concept was they were running a pirate TV station from a boiler room in the Thames studios, and each week they had to humorously sneak in, past the commissionaire who may well have been Henry Magee. Or maybe not. But he should have been. ANNEKA RICE bagged extra curricular work from TREASURE HUNT as a reporter.

7 Comments

7 Comments

  1. Damon

    July 4, 2010 at 1:51 pm

    I really liked this show. It was on Tuesdays at 4.45. Jim Sweeney and Steve Stein presented from a boiler room at a desk in front of a couple of TV screens. There was a chute that presenters such as Mike Smith slid down in order to get to the CBTV News studio. There was another reporter regularly on the show called Paul who had a little dog called Edward who was always with him. It showed pop videos, did showbizzy and tv news that we 12 year old 80s people liked … and I remember them doing a feature on how small Walkmen had got.

    In the final series, they knocked through and created an extension which looked very similar to the TV am studio. It got a bit duller from this point onwards really and the boiler room wasn’t featured as much. And I recall Jim and Steve were demoted or disappeared of, too.

    They were on air at the same time Channel 4 went live in early Nov 1982. I remember them doing a feature on it and the presenter hilariously was trying to use the colourful Channel 4 logo as a map to find his way in the C4 building.

  2. Damon

    March 31, 2015 at 4:20 am

    Wow has no one else responded to this page since me in 2010? I dispute the dates incidentally, I think it went on until at least 1984 or 1985

    • Mark M

      November 30, 2017 at 8:49 pm

      Yeah, it was definitely still going in 1984. I remember the guy with the moustache going to the Isle of Man to race in the 1984 TT.

  3. Droogie

    March 31, 2015 at 10:54 pm

    I do remember Mel Smith’s old comedy partner Bob Goody also being one of the original presenters

  4. Damon

    September 19, 2015 at 7:30 am

    The blurb here likens it to Magpie but I think it was a bit cooler than that. Also, was not Freetime (what ya gonna do, what you gonna do) presented by former Magpier Mick Robertson, a little more like Magpie than CBTV?

  5. Tony

    March 28, 2016 at 1:27 am

    My recollection is that the idea of having young presenters link the programs from the boiler room was shamelessly ripped off by the BBC who changed the boiler room to a broom cupboard and launched the careers of Phillip Schofield and Andi Peters

  6. Simon

    July 1, 2018 at 7:32 pm

    I’ve got a feeling that this was live, as the day ‘Town Called Malice’ went to no.1 in Feb ’82, the presenters said something along the lines of ‘and this has just gone straight in today at no.1!’

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